Architecture graduates took top honors at IAP Graduate Award

Rabeeyah Arif, a graduate of Razia Hassan School of Architecture (RHSA), won the IAP (Institute of Architects Pakistan) Graduate Award while Hashim Ashraf, graduate and faculty at RHSA received an honorable mention for the same award. The IAP Graduate Award is considered the most prestigious Architecture Thesis award in Pakistan in which students from all over the country compete.

Given below are a few details about winning projects:

Rabeeyah Arif

My final year Dissertation was titled Sanctuary of Thought: Revealing the Palimpsest - Travelling Back to the Origin. It was conceived as an Archaeological museum / place of gathering and intellectual discourse on the site of the neglected ruins of the Royal Kitchens in the Lahore Fort.

The project is a manifold architectural intervention that is revitalizing and rehabilitating the historic valuable site. Revealing the hidden fifteen layers of history below the Lahore Fort and providing shelter for the archaeological remains. Opening up and providing greater access and awareness to the temple of Loh. Creating a space for free-thinking and dialogue, a place for intellectual discourse. Whilst enlightening the future generations to a greater realization of identity through a critical look at the cities’ actual buried history.

Hashim Ashraf

Film is a very powerful medium as it creates a sense of space and imagination for the viewer. Although film and architecture are different fields, they share common ground in many ways. Both represent time, light and space and other elements like transition, transformation and composition.

A film is basically a series of still shots and those carefully taken still shots can effectively portray architectural spaces. Still shots are real images with visible architectural elements like trusses, surfaces, space and light composed on a flat plane which portray actual spaces, whose plan is very real. This portrayal of composed architectural elements helps the viewer to walk through scenes which are conveyed in a certain sequence narrating a story in the film. It is thus that film can enhance the experience and feeling of a space using architecture.